Word: mazarin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...example. Image: Daumier doctors (no, not Daumier) attend to the ailing Cardinal Mazarin. They assume grave countenances and huddle aside for a conference with Colbert, Mazarin's aid and confidant. Diagnosis: lung dropsy. Prescription: bleeding and the ingestion of rhubarb and precious stones. The opening sequences of Louis XIV possess all the touches of realism that we have come to expect of contemporary, slice-of-life realism, but it is a realism rendered bizarre by its historical setting. Realism reified, alienated. If the characters believe the witchcraft of the doctors, can we be sure at any moment that we know...
...aesthetic most antithetical to his own, and once he had found it he let it run amuck. For this reason, Louis differs from almost every other hero of rise and/or fall narratives in that he is totally devoid of development. The same logic that complains his refusal of Mazarin's legacy in reel one, explains his disdain for forks in reel three. Money, forks, meats, music, for Louis it is a question of quantity and not quality. Louis remains stationary, while reality, i.e., appearances, kaleidoscope about him. He is heroic in preposterousness...
...pageantry, treating his subject with an iconic, reverential frontality. Only at the very end does he reassert himself. We see Louis at last in private. Suddenly the film is thrown back on the chaos of its own beginning. We see the spectre of Louis's future in the dying Mazarin. We see that even the Machiavellian Louis cannot escape the clutches of his own deceit. That his philosophy is made feasible only by what it ignores. That behind the facade there is, indeed, another facade...